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Eggs Stuffed with Anchovies
Take some hard-boiled eggs, remove the shells, chop off a thin slice from each end, cut them in halves, take out the yolks and stand each half on its end on the dish in which they are to be served. For each egg take one anchovy, remove the scales and bones, cut them up very fine and mix with the yolks, previously crushed; put all into a saucepan with a little warm butter and stir until the butter is thoroughly mixed in. Put this into the whites and serve with Dutch sauce poured over.
Eggs, Sultana Put into a basin the yolks of three eggs with a tablespoonful and a half of olive oil and one tablespoonful of chutney, beat well and turn it out onto a dish. Break six eggs, one at a time, into a teacup, put them one by one on the sauce and set the dish in a moderate oven until the eggs are set, but not overdone. Serve on the same dish very hot.
Two separate egg dishes run together in the original text: stuffed halves under hollandaise, and eggs baked on a chutney-yolk sauce. Both are hotel supper food, quick to assemble once the components are ready.
- Dutch sauceNineteenth-century American and English books use "Dutch sauce" for what is now called hollandaise — an emulsion of egg yolk, butter and lemon or vinegar. It should be warm, not hot, when it goes over the eggs, or it will break on the plate.
- The anchoviesThe instruction to scale and bone points to whole salt-cured anchovies rather than prepared fillets. Tinned fillets in oil are already trimmed; since one whole anchovy is two fillets, count two fillets per egg, rinsed and patted dry if they are very salty. Add no further salt to the yolk mixture until you have tasted it.
- Warming the fillingThe saucepan step is only to loosen the yolks with butter into a smooth paste. Keep the heat very low and stir constantly; if the mixture gets hot the yolk granulates and turns grainy.
- Standing the halvesTrimming a sliver from each end is what lets the halves sit upright. Cut the eggs crosswise, not lengthwise, and pipe or spoon the filling in so it mounds slightly.
- Chutney in the Sultana eggsThe recipe does not specify a type; the sweet Anglo-Indian mango kind sold under names like Major Grey is the likeliest intention. Chop any large fruit pieces small, or the sauce will not spread evenly under the eggs.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given; a moderate oven is conventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F. The dish is shallow and the eggs sit on a yolk-and-oil sauce, so they set fast — begin checking early and pull them when the whites are just opaque, since they carry on cooking in the hot dish.
- The raw-yolk baseThe three yolks beaten with oil and chutney form a thin custard beneath the eggs, and in a short bake it may not get far past warm. Use pasteurized eggs for the sauce if that matters to you, or bake until the base is visibly thickened rather than glossy.
- YieldThe stuffed eggs give two pieces per egg; count three halves a person as a first course. The Sultana eggs use six eggs — three servings at two eggs apiece, or six at one egg each as part of a larger breakfast.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 Cook Book collected the hotel's working repertoire, and its egg chapter is a substantial one, since eggs did the heavy lifting at breakfast, at supper after the theatre, and on the long list of light dishes a hotel had to produce at any hour. Anchovy paired with hard-boiled egg was a standing savoury combination in the English kitchen Oscar's readers looked to, and the salted anchovy was then a pantry staple sold whole in barrels rather than filleted in tins. The second recipe carries its Anglo-Indian origins on its face: bottled chutney had become a fashionable condiment in American hotels by the 1890s, and "Sultana" appears on menus of the period alongside terms like "Bombay" or "Indienne," though what it signalled is far from consistent — in period cookery "sultane" also attaches to quite unrelated garnishes.